Building Geospatial Ontologies from Geographical Databases

The last few years have seen a growing interest in approaches that define methodologies to automatically extract semantics from databases by using ontologies. Geographic data are very rarely collected in a well organized way, quite often they lack both metadata and conceptual schema. Extracting semantic information from data stored in a geodatabase is complex and an extension of the existing methodologies is needed. We describe an approach to extracting a geospatial ontology from geographical data stored in spatial databases. To provide geospatial semantics we introduce new relations which define geospatial ontology that can serve as a basis for an advanced user querying system. Some examples of use of the methodology in the urban domain are presented.